About

Renaissance Skin is a 5-year research project funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award. Based at King’s College London, the project is led by Professor Evelyn Welch. Over the 5 years, we will study the wide range of ways in which skin, both animal and human, was conceptualised and used in Europe between 1450 and 1700, a period of enormous change in terms of global contacts and connections, and scientific innovation.

Professor Evelyn Welch

Principal Investigator

Key Interests

Renaissance and early modern visual and material culture

Medical Humanities

Dress and Fashion

Biography

Professor Welch graduated from Harvard University with a BA
in Renaissance History and Literature (Magna cum Laude) and received her PhD
from the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has taught at the
Universities of Essex, Birkbeck, Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London,
where she served as Dean of Arts and Vice-Principal for Research and
International Affairs before taking on the role of Provost and Senior Vice
President (Arts & Sciences) at King’s College London.

Professor Welch has led a range of major research programmes
including The Material Renaissance which was funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the Getty Foundation, Beyond Text:
Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects, a £5.5 million AHRC strategic research
programme which ran from 2005-2012 and the Humanities in the European Research
Area Fashioning the Early Modern project. She has published
extensively on European art and material culture including books such as Art
in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 200), Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale,
2005), Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Rodopi,
2011), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles and Innovation in
Europe, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2017). Professor Welch currently serves as the
Chair of the Warburg Institute Advisory Council, Chair of Trustees of the
Dulwich Picture Gallery and sits on the British Library Advisory Board . She is
currently the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator working on a major project
on Renaissance Skin.

Research Summary

Evelyn Welch leads the
project and will be publishing a number of essays, articles and books as part
of Renaissance Skin including articles underway on:

‘Smoking, Snuffing and
the Smell of Masculinity in Early Modern Europe’

Dr Hannah Murphy

Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Key Interests

The body in early modern Germany

Inscription, writing, and the legibility of the body

Touch, gender, and knowledge

Collecting skin

Biography

I
am a historian of early modern European knowledge practices, with a special
focus on science and medicine. I did my undergraduate degree in my home country
of Ireland (TCD), before heading to the States for a PhD in Berkeley. Before
joining the Renaissance Skin team, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel
College, Oxford. I've written about libraries, physicians, anatomy, letter-writing,
ordinances, artisans, and calligraphy. My forthcoming book, Making Medicine in
Reformation Nuremberg draws some of these together.

Research Summary

As
the lead researcher on the project, I take an interest in all things 'skin'. My
current research for Renaissance Skin looks broadly at the material culture of
human and animal skin in Reformation Germany - how objects, senses and medical
knowledge informed the gendering of practices and beliefs inside and outside
the home, and how domestic and political practices informed medical
understanding of the surface of the body. I'm editing a collection of essays
under the title The Porous Body in Early Modern Europe, and co-writing an
article on porosity, smell and gender with Evelyn Welch, as well as working on
several article-length pieces about touch, religious belief and the politics of
skin. Ultimately, I hope to answer the question: how did the body become
legible in early modern Europe, and why does that matter?

Dr Kathleen Walker-Meikle

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Key Interests

Late medieval and early modern history of medicine, in particular, pharmacology and toxicology

Late medieval and early modern science, in particular, natural history.

Medieval natural magic

Palaeography and digital editions of texts

Biography

Dr Walker-Meikle’s research interests focus on the relationship between animals and humans, particularly in medicine and natural history. She received her PhD from University College London, and published Medieval Pets (Boydell & Brewer, 2012), the first social and cultural study of companion animals in the late medieval period. Kathleen received a Wellcome Trust fellowship grant to examine animal bites and toxicology in the late medieval period. Kathleen has a strong interest in palaeography, manuscript studies, and digital humanities, and has worked on the Antidotarium magnum with Professor Monica Green (Arizona State University), with the Consortium of European Research Libraries on archival digital infrastructures and at University College Cork on Irish humanism and palaeography. She was recently a research fellow at UCL on the Inner Lives project, examining late medieval cosmology, magic, astrology, and emotions. On the Renaissance Skin project she will be focusing on animal skin and diseases afflicting the skin.

Research Summary

A major focus in the course of the Renaissance Skin project will involve examining ideas and descriptions of animal skin, especial fur, feathers and horns. I am particularly interested in examining European texts on ‘new’ animals from Asia and the New World. This will contribute to our knowledge on the changing ideas of animal skin in a globalised world in the period 1450 and 1700, and the connections and differences between human and animal skins, in textual, material and iconographic culture.

I will also look at the damage caused to animal and human skin, mainly from diseases such as smallpox, syphilis, scrofula, cancer, leprosy, lupus, and will also draw on previous research on the bites and stings of animals). A wide of variety of sources will be consulted, from pharmacological preparations to treat such afflictions to their appearance in literature and iconography.

Dr Paolo Savoia

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Key Interests

History of Science & Medicine

History of the Body & Gender

Social History

Intellectual History

Biography

Paolo Savoia has studied philosophy and history at the Universities of Bologna and Pisa. He obtained his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. He has published on the history of psychiatry and sexuality, on the historiography of science, and on the history of medicine in early modern Italy. His forthcoming book, in Italian, explores the history of plastic surgery in the Renaissance and is entitled Uomini e chirurghi: Bellezza, dolore e medicina nell’Italia moderna.

Research Summary

Within the framework of the Renaissance Skin Project, I am currently working on four main research topics. 1) The history of grafting in early modern Europe with special reference to the connections between plants, animal, and human skin. 2) The social and intellectual history of barber-surgeons in early modern Italy, particularly from the point of view of the relations between medicine, sociability, and gender. 3) The history of the professions and practices relating to cutting, treating, healing, and selling animal and human skin and of their appropriation by natural magic and natural philosophy. 4) A revision of the idea of the monolithic dominance of Galenism on Renaissance and early modern medicine, particularly by taking into the account the role of surgeons. This branch of my research aims at better assessing the relationships between humoralism and mechanism in the history of representations and practical interventions on the human body.

Dr Natasha Awais-Dean

Project Manager

Key Interests

Early modern European material culture

Jewellery history

Early modern masculinity

Early modern metalwork

The material culture of plague

Biography

Natasha Awais-Dean received her doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to this, she read Modern & Medieval Languages (specialising in French and Italian) at the University of Cambridge, followed by an MA in History of Design at the Royal College of Art. She has curatorial experience from working at three national museums: the British Museum, the V&A, and the National Portrait Gallery. Natasha has worked on the project management of research grants for a number of years. Natasha is Features Editor of Jewellery History Today (the magazine publication for the Society of Jewellery Historians) and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of History at King's College London. Her book Bejewelled: Men and Jewellery in Tudor and Jacobean England was published by the British Museum in 2017.

Research Summary

Natasha is project manager, a role that involves organising project events and activities, all external and internal communication, and financial management. Additionally, Natasha will contribute to providing material for the 'themes' section of this website, researching objects to be selected under the various categories, in particular skin piercings.

Dr Juliet Claxton

Researcher & Admin Support

Key Interests

Early modern material culture

Porcelain and collecting

Early modern dress & textiles

Merchants and luxury suppliers in the early modern period

Biography

Juliet
was awarded her doctorate in 2012 from Queen Mary, University of London under
the supervision of Professor Evelyn Welch. Her research explored the economic,
trade and social context of Asian porcelain in England from 1588-1700. She has taught on undergraduate modules at
Queen Mary and has worked as a project coordinator on both the HERA –funded
project ‘Fashioning the Early Modern’ and a joint V&A/King’s College
initiative ‘Early Modern Dress in Your Hands’.

Research Summary

Juliet
is currently researching two areas within the Renaissance Skin project. She is looking at the connections between
porcelain and skin, both as a literary trope and the physical depiction of
animal and human skin within ceramic glazes. She is also studying the
development and use of leather in 17th century men’s armour. In particular she is studying the ‘buff coat’
that was worn by men at arms throughout Europe in the early modern period. The buff coat offered a lighter weight
protection in battle and freed soldiers from the constrictions of traditional
plate armour in-line with the changing nature of 17th century
warfare and weapons. The ubiquitous
nature of the garment meant that it was adopted as the universal symbol of a
soldier and it appears in many portraits and group militia paintings of the
period.

Skin had a multiplicity of meanings in Renaissance Europe, where it was often seen as a mesh rather than a barrier. One example that illustrates this is when considering hair. In this period, hair was regarded as a vapour that hardened after passing through the pores of the scalp. And so, Renaissance treatises on skin included baldness, as well as pox, when discussing diseases.

The connections and divide between human and animal skin are also key to our understanding of how skin was characterised, leading to broader questions of what separated men and women from beasts.

The project explores

The changing notions of human and animal skin in Europe between 1450 and 1700 through textual, material, and visual evidence;

The ways in which human and animal skins were connected, differentiated, and displayed both morally and physically;

The concepts of colour and complexion in an increasingly globalised world;

The relationship between diseases that disfigured the surfaces of the body, skin care, cosmetics, and clothing.

The aim for our 5 years is to create an interdisciplinary, medical humanities approach to Renaissance skin (human and animal) in Europe, 1450-1700, and break down the divide between the study of human and animal skin diseases.

This site is designed, on a practical level, to keep you informed of our events and other activities that we run or are engaged with. In the Updates section, you will find informal reports on research visits to museums or elsewhere and on seminars or workshops that various team members have attended. We are keen to open conversation on our research and the material that we use, and so the Themes section is intended to serve as a portal into some of our findings. Here, under the categories of ‘Defining’, ‘Breaking’, ‘Living’, ‘Consuming’, ‘Protecting’, and ‘Misbehaving’, you will discover sources that we have found interesting and have helped to shape our thinking. Thumbnail images of the sources within each category appear to the right of the screen, allowing you to jump to a particular source, or you can simply explore them all by scrolling down through the page. Clicking on the main image of the source will pull up a larger version – allowing you to focus on the details – and from here you can scroll through each source in a linear fashion. Crucially, this is an evolving resource and so we urge you to revisit often to discover what new material we have chosen to share.